Ask HN: Has there ever been a bubble that didn't burst? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has there ever been a bubble that didn't burst?

5 pointsrelix6 comments

If you read up on the lifecycle of a bubble, one key property is that people will claim "this time it's different" because of several reasons, which turn out to be incorrect when the bubble inevitably pops.

Has there ever been bubble-like growth without the bursting at the end? In other words, has it ever been that "this time it's different" turned out to be true?

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One of the defining characteristics of a bubble is that a threshold-clearing percentage of people don't know it's a bubble.

Thus, there's no such thing as "a bubble that didn't burst", there are only either things that weren't bubbles in the first place... or bubbles that haven't burst YET.

An example that comes to mind is petroleum. There are those who believe that oil-based energy, which is a key underpinning of our economy, military, lifestyle, etc., has been part of a "long boom" following coal but has reached a peak and will cause our economy to burst like a bubble when it finally retracts... and there are those who disagree and think we'll find economical substitutes as incentives warrant our doing so.

One could argue Gold is a 6000 year old bubble. Desperately digging it up to bury it somewhere else. Only because it's the particular element that doesn't react chemically and is just the right amount of common/rare.

The Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment. Growth was negligible over human lifetimes for as long as their were humans, yet in the last 200 – 250 years most people in the Western world and Japan become orders of magnitude richer than our predecessors, and much of the rest of the world is catching up.

To play the devil's advocate, this could be interpreted as bubble-in-progress (what with "Peak $someResource imminent" etc.)

to add to Piskvorrr's point, if population isn't a bubble waiting to explode I don't know what is ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_curve.svg

fiat currency?

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